Yeah, it was working fine but then it got really hard to use pulse. Just when it was stable, we get a few good years before having to switch to a new unstable thing, since pulse lost support.
I used to have crackling issues with pulseaudio. It needed restarting constantly. Not issue since the switch to pipewire. So my experienced was the absolute opposite of yours.
Depending on the output device it’s still using ALSA underneath (e.g. Bluetooth output instead is given to the BT stack), PipeWire is dealing with managing and routing the audio output rather than actually performing it.
Yeah, it was working fine but then it got really hard to use pulse. Just when it was stable, we get a few good years before having to switch to a new unstable thing, since pulse lost support.
I used to have crackling issues with pulseaudio. It needed restarting constantly. Not issue since the switch to pipewire. So my experienced was the absolute opposite of yours.
I never understood why we didn’t just stick with ALSA. OSS was crap, certainly, but ALSA seemed to do the job.
Depending on the output device it’s still using ALSA underneath (e.g. Bluetooth output instead is given to the BT stack), PipeWire is dealing with managing and routing the audio output rather than actually performing it.